The Dorothy L Sayers Society

The Society is registered in England as a Charity, number 272120.
Our registered address is The Master’s House, Old Common Road, Chorleywood, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, WD3 5LW, United Kingdom.

In relation to any web site with a domain name ending sayers.org.uk:

The Wimsey Arms, Crest and armorial bearings are copyright © the estate of C W Scott-Giles, used by permission.

The photograph of Dorothy L Sayers on the biography page was taken by Howard Coster.

Unless otherwise stated, all other text and graphics on our web sites are copyright © The Dorothy L Sayers Society.

No unauthorised publication or copying, in whole or in part, of the contents of this web site is permitted. For permission to quote from these pages, or information about the use of the Wimsey crest, please write to legal@sayers.org.uk.

If you wish to link to our web site, you may do so, and you do not need to ask our permission first. We would be grateful if you could let us know you have done so, as we may want to link back to your site. We prefer wherever possible that links are to our home page (https://www.sayers.org.uk/), since we cannot guarantee that more specific addresses will always continue to work. Please do not attempt to embed our web site in a frame, or to link directly to any images: we reserve the right to employ technical measures to prevent such links working reliably.

We do not administer the rights in any of the published or unpublished works of Dorothy L Sayers, although we can often help put you in touch with the relevant agents: for further information, please write to info@sayers.org.uk.

Please note that all of her works, both published and unpublished, are still fully protected by copyright worldwide until at least 2027. Any statements you may see elsewhere to the contrary are incorrect, and your use or distribution of any works you obtain from these sources may be unlawful.

The only alleged exceptions we are aware of are Whose Body? in the USA, and some other books in Canada. However, these are only in the “public domain” in those specific countries, due to anomalies in their copyright laws which are not recognised as valid by most other countries. Any free e-books you may find may therefore not be lawfully downloaded by anybody outside those specific countries.

The Society publishes a number of books, periodicals and other items. The rights in most items, and any separately acknowledged articles in our periodicals and occasional papers, remain with the original author(s). We hold some other rights, notably in the compilation and layout of our periodicals, and the entirety of The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion, both in print and online.

We do not generally administer any rights we do not ourselves hold, but can usually help put you in touch: please write to info@sayers.org.uk.

Whilst we take reasonable care to ensure the suitability and appropriateness of external links presented on our web sites, we are not responsible for the content of any pages which may be reached thereby, including (without limitation) any content which might be considered offensive or illegal, or which might contain viruses or otherwise be harmful to the security or integrity of computer systems. Visitors follow any external links entirely at their own risk.

Some product links are provided in association with Amazon.co.uk.

In all matters, including those pertaining to data protection and any contracts for the purchase of goods or services, the Society resides and does business solely in the UK. Unless otherwise agreed in writing, your entering into any form of agreement with us indicates your acceptance of the exclusive jurisdiction of the UK courts (usually those of England and Wales, but in some cases Scottish law may apply).

Service of legal notices and similar communications must be in writing and sent to our Registered Address as above, using tracked and signed-for mail. Proof of posting will not be accepted as proof of delivery.

Please note that we are a British organisation. Any “take-down” notices, requests for disclosure of confidential information (including, but not limited to, personal data howsoever obtained), and any similar purported legal demands, from any source (including foreign law enforcement bodies), will only be considered if they are supported by an order of a competent British court.

As of February 2024, we have not been required by any competent authority to remove any web site content or to disclose any personal data.

On pages concerned with making credit card payments for goods or services, some basic personal contact information is collected for the purpose of fulfilling the orders placed.

Our payment provider (Worldpay) does of course also collect personal and financial information for the purpose of completing any payment, directly on their own secure web site. Some information regarding the transaction is notified to us by Worldpay, although this does not include any sensitive details of the payment instrument used (such as the credit/debit card number): this information is held only by Worldpay and the banks (theirs and yours).

If you are a member of the Society, or wish to have access to restricted resources (including the online Lord Peter Wimsey Companion), we collect and maintain personal details including name, address and email address. This information is used to administer membership and to monitor who has access to copyright material. Any details supplied are only accessible to authorised officers of the Society.

All data collected by the Society is held and processed within the UK, and we do not allow it to be transferred to or processed in any other country, with the following exceptions:

• When we ship items overseas, the recipient’s name and postal contact details will become known and may be processed by shipping organisations in all the countries through which the package passes.
• The entire contents of email communications is visible to any service provider involved in transmitting the email message.

Data collected directly by third parties, such as our payment providers, is governed by those organisations’ privacy policies, which may differ from ours.

Some areas of our web site, typically those which are open to members only or which involve online payments, use cookies to maintain a “session”. These cookies do not contain any personally identifiable information.

Please note that our use of cookies is not optional − you may choose to configure your browser to reject the cookies, but you will then not be able to use those areas of the web site. Other areas of the web site will continue to work normally.

Except as described above, we do not collect any personally identifying information about visitors to our web sites. In common with most web sites, the IP address and the “User-Agent” (product name) of the web browser being used are recorded, along with the URL of each page visited on our sites. In some cases we will also record the immediate destination page URL of any external link followed, or the URL of the page from which you linked to our site, which may include details of any search terms you used. This information is never made available to any third party except in aggregate statistical form.

Under the terms of UK Data Protection legislation, which is based on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), data subjects (ie. individual natural persons) have a number of rights.

All our use of personal data is necessary to support an agreement between you and us (such as administering your membership of the Society, or fulfilling orders for publications), so our legal bases for processing personal data as described above are, to use the GDPR terminology, a contract with the individual and legitimate interests. In particular, we do not rely on explicit consent, which means you do not in general have a “right to be forgotten” by us (ie. you cannot simply ask us to delete your data if we still have a legitimate reason to keep it). You do, however, have the right to see all the information we hold on you, and to ask us to correct it if it is wrong. We also have an obligation always to process your data in line with the data protection principles enshrined in law. Please contact us at privacy@sayers.org.uk if you wish to obtain a copy of your data.

We may on occasion ask you for permission to use or disclose personal data for other specific purposes, for example to provide a list of Convention attendees to other attendees. In such a case, we will always ask for your explicit consent. You may withdraw your consent later: if you do so, we will not process or disclose your data any further for those specific purposes, and where practical we will notify anybody to whom we have already disclosed your data.

If you have concerns about the way we process your personal data, please raise them with us in the first instance. You can also contact the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for advice or to make a complaint.

This section applies to all purchases from the Society, including membership subscriptions, whether made online or otherwise.

In contracting with the Society for the purchase of goods or services you may have certain legal rights. If there is any conflict between your legal rights and the provisions in the rest of this section, your legal rights will take precedence.

Please also see the section Jurisdiction above.

We normally require payment at the time of placing an order. Until you have received an order confirmation email from us, there is no contract between us, even if your payment has been processed. Note that any email you receive from our payment provider (Worldpay) is a payment confirmation only, not an order confirmation.

Worldpay and, through them, your card issuer, may sometimes advise us to treat certain payments with extra caution. We reserve the right at our sole discretion to make further enquiries before accepting your order, or to reject your order altogether. If we reject your order, we will give you a full refund, or, if possible, cancel the payment.
Reasons for increased caution may include: a mismatch between the postal address you supply to Worldpay and the billing address known to your card issuer; incorrectly responding or choosing not to respond to a password challenge given by your card issuer (eg. “MasterCard SecureCode” or “Verified by VISA”); or a mismatch between your card’s country of issue and the location from which you connect to our web site.
You are therefore advised to take care in completing the payment forms, to avoid delay. If you know in advance of any reasons why your payment might be flagged for extra scrutiny (eg. if you live in a different country from your card issuer), please use the “Special instructions” area of our payment page to tell us.

For the purpose of the Distance Selling Regulations and similar laws:

• Unless otherwise specified, the supplier of all goods or services ordered and paid for through this web site is the Dorothy L Sayers Society, Registered Charity number 272120. Our postal address is 30 Greenfield, Witham, Essex, CM8 2FA.
• The goods or services supplied are as described on this web site and in any email confirmation you receive.
• The web payment page, prior to taking payment, shows a full breakdown of the amount to be paid, including shipping costs where appropriate. Subsequent emails will normally only show the total amount paid.
• Our order fulfilment policy is to make no substitutions. If we are unable to supply the exact items ordered, we will contact you to discuss the matter. If you agree to an alternative, it will be supplied under a new separate contract, with the value of the original contract being applied as a credit. If there are no suitable alternatives, we will give you a full refund.
• If you are in the UK or the EU, and are a consumer within the meaning of the relevant legislation (normally, that you are a natural person, and are not making the purchase as part of any business or trade), then you have a right to cancel the contract within 7 working days of receiving goods or services, without giving a reason (for example, you may simply change your mind), and to receive a full refund. Please note, however:
  • The right to cancel does not apply to tickets or reservations for an event (such as the Society Convention).
  • Membership subscriptions are a contract for a service which begins as soon as you have received any associated item. In particular, once you have been given access to downloadable PDF Bulletins, or have been sent any paper Bulletins, the contract can no longer be cancelled.
  • Some other items are exempt, eg. personalised items, special orders, downloadable items, and most digital, audio or video media if you have broken any seals.
  • We require you to return any goods to us in re-saleable condition and in good time, at your own expense.
  • You are legally obliged to take reasonable care of the goods until they reach us. You may therefore wish to take out suitable shipping insurance.

If you order goods from us and you discover within a reasonable time that they are faulty or unfit for purpose, we will offer you a replacement or a refund, at your option. We may ask you to return the original items (at our expense), so you must take reasonable care of them.

Unless we have made a mistake, we will not normally make any refunds except as stated above. If you have made a genuine accidental error, or there are other extenuating circumstances, please get in touch and we may be able to help, though we cannot promise to do so.

All refunds will be made by crediting to the original payment instrument (eg. credit or debit card).